Understanding container management
The AWS instances we spun up in Chapter 2, Setting Up the Splunk Environment, were cloud-based containers. In this section, we will look at containers in general. What is a container? A container is a software development concept that allows multiple isolated processes to share the same OS kernel. The idea of multiple isolated processes sharing a host (virtualization) is not a new one. Organizations have used virtual machine technology in various forms for decades. For example, IBM introduced virtualization concepts with the CP-40 in 1967. VMware, one of the well-known virtual machine platforms, was patented in 1998.
Containerization, as we know it today, was introduced in 2013 with the development of Docker. A Docker container is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering where software is packaged with all the libraries, code, tools, and configuration files that they need to run isolated on a host. Containers such as Docker share the host’...
